At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, mixed messages about technology ping through the cavernous convention halls like phaser beams. Think big. Think small. Think green. Think blue sky.

CES is where corporate giants and plucky little start-ups try to convince 140,000 techophiles to buy or publicize the newest gizmos. At last year’s CES, with the economy flying high, everyone was buzzing about a 108-inch TV from Sharp. At this year’s convention, which ended today, jumbo devices seemed somehow inappropriate, and growth was best measured in terms of capacity and reach.

A company called pureSilicon unveiled a solid-state hard-drive with a capacity of 1 terrabyte. That’s 1,000 gigabytes, or a million megabytes, in a 2 1/2-inch drive that’s more resistant to rough handling than a conventional platter drive. (By comparison, a year ago, a sold-state drive with 16GB was considered a big deal.)

But the biggest thing to emerge from CES this year is the gigantic net of media and information that technology is stitching around us. Soon there will be no place to hide from the digital bombardment. That’s a good thing if you’re stranded on Mt. Everest and are trying to get a signal on your cell phone or GPS unit. That’s a bad thing if you’re driving cross-country to grandma’s house and your kids insist on watching “American Idol.” At CES, AT&T showed off its new Cruisecast service, which sends 22 satellite TV channels to cars equipped with rooftop receivers.

The line between TV and the Internet is getting blurrier, as a new generation of flat-screen TVs will connect to the Web to provide you with headlines, Netflix movies and YouTube videos.

In some situations, small is still beautiful, and I saw some remarkable little devices for slinging your media to faraway places. Netbooks, the miniatures laptops that debuted last year with the Asus Eee, were ubiquitous this year. But as a movie buff, my favorite small toys were the Twinkie-sized projectors from Optoma and Wowee that connect to your iPod so you can beam moving images onto the wall of a meeting room or a tent. Camping will never be the same.

Green technology was one of the recurring themes of this year’s CES. Many companies were trumpeting their ecologically friendly packaging, with soy inks and sugar-based plastics. Sony touted its recycling of everything from computers to movie sets. Schwinn showed off a battery-powered bicycle. Yet companies selling solar power mats and wind-up radios were relegated to the outskirts, along with the Chinese manufacturers of iPhone knock-offs.

For me, solar is the ultimate gee-whiz technology, the thing that can simultaneously save the planet and the economy. But the major manufacturers would rather shape a future that resembles the sci-fi of yesteryear. Toshiba showed off a gesture-controlled TV that allows users to access data by waving their hands, like Tom Cruise in “Minority Report.” And LG presented a cell-phone wristwatch that evoked memories of “Dick Tracy.” Me, I don’t need a cell-phone wristwatch to know what time it is. It’s time to go home.